38 SARRACENIA RUBRA.—RED-FLOWERED TRUMPET LEAF. 
about these flowers. It is the plant which acts like the “veno- 
mous serpent,” and entices the “lurking insect” to its sure 
destruction. How they work to this end is very curious. In 
“Silliman’s Journal” for 1873, Professor Gray quotes from the 
English translation of Maout and Decaisnes’ “System of Botany:” 
“The pitcher-shaped leaves are effective insect traps; a sugary 
secretion exudes at the mouth of the pitchers and attracts insects, 
which descend lower in the tube, where they meet with a belt of 
reflexed hairs, which facilitate their descent into a watery fluid 
that fills the bottom of the cavity, and at the same time prevents 
their egress.” This is given as of our present plant, S. zadra, 
but as Canada is mentioned, Dr. Gray thinks it must have had 
reference to S. pupurca, which is the only one found in Canada. 
Dr. Gray says he wishes “to call attention to the statement that 
Sarracenia produces a sugary excretion which attracts flies to 
their ruin, this being the first time, so far as I know, that any such 
statement has app:ared in print.” However, it appears in 
print in American publications long before this. In Darby's 
“Botany of the Southern States,” written in 1855, we read at 
page 219: “This genus affords a striking example of a great 
modification of the petiole, since there is no doubt the tube part 
is the petiole, and what we call the lamina, the true lamina of the 
leaf. These tubes are generally filled with water, which is sup- 
posed to be secreted by the plart, and this always contains dead 
insects. The tube could not have been formed in a better man- 
ner to accomplish a given end than this is to catch insects. The 
saccharine secretion which surrounds the orifice decoys insects 
to the tube, and the water entices them in. There are hairs 
pointing downwards so as to permit an easy descent, but makes 
the egress difficult.” As before noted, it is not certain that our 
present species, the red or Walter’s Sarracenia, has this power 
of excreting honeyed matter; so we give what ts said of it in full, 
that collectors may be on the lookout to verify the statement for 
themselves, 
As for the fact that the pitcher is the petiole, and that it has 
